Indonesia's reputation for bad corporate governance may be undeserved, an academic from Australia's University of Melbourne has claimed in a new book.

In 'Is Corporate Governance relevant in Indonesia?: How corporate governance practices affect organisation,' Dr Peter Verheze argues that since the Asian financial crisis there has been a lot of progress made on tackling corruption.

Indonesia scored 3.0 out of 10 in a 2011 corruption perception survey by Transparency International, with 10 being "very clean" and zero "highly corrupt."

"To an extent there is still a lot of corruption but there is improvement," Dr Verhezen told Radio Australia's Connect Asia program.

"The top 10 blue-chips really have dramatically improved their governance structures and as a result really tried to reduce corruption significantly as well."

Dr Verhezen said some Western business cultures may even be able to learn from Indonesia.

He said the dual-tier board structure, which Indonesia adopted from the Dutch during colonial times, could be used by businesses in Australia and the United States.

"Definitely there are some structures where we (Australia) can learn from, meaning these dual structures and separation of chairman and CEO."

However, he conceded more transparency is needed regarded the relationships between businesses and government officials.

"As long as the government and the public governance will not improve, we are afraid that it will still have a negative impact on corporations.

"As we know reputation is a very fickle concept, meaning it takes years to develop trust and you can lose it in a minute."